Toggle validation in MVC 3 Razor

Question

I'm using MVC 3 with razor as the view engine and the unobtrusive client validation enabled.

I'm trying to create a form where the user has a radio button group to select their preferred contact method - either phone or email. Depending on the option selected, I want to show the appropriate textbox, but then also enable/disable the required validator for the appropriate textbox.

My markup looks something like this at the moment (Just starting out with MVC so please point out any obvious mistakes):

<div id="prefferedContact">
    <p>Preferred Contact Method *</p>
        <input type="radio" id="contactMethodEmail" name="PreferredContactMethod" value="email" @if (Model.PreferredContactMethod != "phone"){<text>checked="checked"</text>} /> <label for="contactMethodEmail">by email</label> 
        <input type="radio" id="contactMethodPhone" name="PreferredContactMethod" value="phone" @if (Model.PreferredContactMethod == "phone"){<text>checked="checked"</text>} /> <label for="contactMethodPhone">by phone</label>
    </div>
    <div id="contactMethodDetails" class="formItem">
        <div id="emailAddressBox">
            @Html.LabelFor(x => x.Email, "Email address")
            @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Email, new { @class = "textbox" })
        </div>
        <div id="phoneNumberBox">
            @Html.LabelFor(x => x.PhoneNumber, "Phone number")
            @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.PhoneNumber, new { @class = "textbox" })
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

There's some jquery function that adds an onclick event to the radio buttons to toggle between the two boxes depending on the selected value.

The Model - for these specific fields - doesn't have any required validation on it at the moment but is binding fine. Also, validation is working on other fields as expected

I really just need to get an idea of:

(a) is it possible to toggle validation on and off
(b) does this impact the ModelState validation in anyway (or do I need to customise it)

I had also thought of having the one textbox for the contact data, but I wanted to have regular expression validation for the email and for the phone number separately. If I was to have a single textbox, could I switch the validation rules on the textbox depending on the selected option???

Hope that's clear enough with enough information.

Thanks

Joel

Answer 1

You can perform class-level validation if you need to enforce rules based on multiple properties:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/10/class-level-model-validation-with-ef-code-first-and-asp-net-mvc-3.aspx

Unfortunately, this seems to only work server-side, so you'd have to implement custom client-side validation.

Another option would be to have two different models, one for each scenario (with common properties in a base class), but this might be a little more complicated.